"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

It is an established fact that the man who killed six people and wounded 12 other people in Tucson was not a Republican. Or a conservative. He didn’t even vote in 2010.

Jared Loughner is a psychotic who bore an irrational grudge against Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Why, then, is MSNBC treating its viewers to hour after hour of discussions today about how Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Sharron Angle and others engaged in irresponsible rhetoric that allegedly could incite people to violence?

It’s a complete non sequitur. At this moment, I’m watching Hardball, where Chris Matthews opened his show with 15 minutes of this nonsense. Nick Gillespie nails it:

Readers of this site know I’m no Sarah Palin fan, but to accuse her of complicity in the murderous spree of a clearly insane person is one of the main reasons that partisan political parties are losing market share. I had myself tweeted that blaming Palin for Jared Loughner’s mass killing would be like blaming J.D. Salinger for Mark David Chapman shooting John Lennon (and as Jesse Walker pointed out, in Chapman’s case, at least we could be sure Chapman had read Salinger).

UPDATE: Olbermann’s on now, insisting that anyone who doesn’t share his pretzel-logic perspective — Sarah Palin’s “target” map must somehow be implicated in the Giffords shooting — is irresponsible. But the demented crackpot (i.e., Loughner, not Olbermann) was living in Kookville, as Allahpundit says:

Yeah, go figure that a guy who spent the summer making nonsensical outbursts in class and answering questions on a math test with “Eat+Sleep+Brush Teeth=Math” wasn’t all that interested in the midterm elections.

UPDATE II: Olbermann keeps going on and on about a “climate of hate,” etc., and yet fails to see that there is no relationship between anything said by Sarah Palin (Michelle Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Sharron Angle, etc.) and Loughner’s crime. What part of non sequitur don’t you understand, Keith?

SHAMELESS CAPITALISM

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